Feefo independent feedback

[george]

Unfortunately he told me that he was tied up all day so he couldn't get to it straight away.

Thats errr reassuring Mr Barling.

[cbarling]

I'll let Ed post his own explanantion if he wants to, but it seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

For instance if I had been asked to do something similar last Wednesday I wouldn't have been able to. I was at the Actinic conference all day.

Whatever, when he does arrive, please be kind to Ed. He's not swam in these waters before

Chris

[Andy@codepath]

Product Reviews

Further to Chris' post, I agree that there is room for both products and more choice for Actinic users can only be a good thing. Hopefully some of the points raised here can clarify the pros and cons of each model. My knowledge of Feefo is limited at this stage (having spent only three hours at a desk since first hearing of it) so if any assertions or comparisons to Soapbox are inaccurate I am happy to stand corrected.

Product Reviews vs General / Service reviews

Soapbox is specifically a product review plug-in and does not cater for feedback about the vendor’s service as a whole or the website in general. It is purely about rating and reviewing specific products as we believed, like several others it would seem, that the two issues were quite different. We took the view that reviews about the service or site as a whole did not warrant management by a plug-in (in an on-site model) as they could be managed using traditional content management methods on a single page.

In addition, we also took the view that asking for a delivery service review at the same time as you ask for a product review had its drawbacks. In many cases, by the time you have sufficient exposure to the product to supply the latter, you have either already complained about, or lost your enthusiasm about the former. The period of time you allow before requesting product feedback is also wholly dependant on the product itself. You might make all the decisions about a product you are ever going to make just by opening the packaging in the case of a pair of cufflinks but might take several days or even weeks to fully evaluate a new golf club.

Product specific vs group specific reviews.

There are clearly advantages to both depending on the type of products you sell. You may want the benefit of a good review on one product to impact positively on similar products but it also holds true that as a consumer, it's no good seeing that 95% of users think your TV's (lets say) are the best when you end up with the one that’s overpriced and has a poor picture. The average quality of a range of products in your store does not necessarily reflect the quality of the product you are interested in buying.

Review Moderation

To me, un-moderated reviews are like performing without a safety net. More impressive if you get it right but put one foot wrong and there’s nothing but sharp rocks down there. Whilst we would strongly advise that constructive negative feedback is also uploaded to your store to give credibility to the positive reviews, moderation gives you the opportunity to remove spam, libellous or defamatory comment or simply to address customer concerns off-line before publishing a resolved issue. Whilst showing a negative review on your site can be used as a positive by subsequently posting your response and ultimately, evidence of the customer’s satisfaction, a negative review that is left unanswered even for a few hours can be very damaging regardless of its validity.

Also, much of the unwanted content that we have been told about by our customers has not been spam or genuinely aggrieved customers but unethical competitors seeking to undermine a product or a company. With a moderated approach you have the opportunity to communicate with the customer and validate their grievance before it is seen in open forum.

SEO

As well as instilling buyer confidence in your products, customer reviews of any kind should be a huge opportunity to improve a sites’ Search Engine Optimization. Soapbox reviews, whilst collected and stored on a server, appear as simple HTML text within the body of your product pages, not as an iFrame or on a third party-site, which we believe gives you the maximum benefit in this area.

Pricing

Sopabox currently offers a fixed price solution regardless of how long you use the product or how much feedback you get. I believe (although have not seen the numbers confirmed) that Feefo is a 'pay-as-you-go' model. We have used both in the past and this really is a personal choice. As a result of this development we may offer a similar model if people prefer to have a very low cost startup and pay only in the event of a successful implementation.

[guccij]

Just to add my concern about an unmoderated review system:

We had a situation earlier this year where a rival company spammed our Codepath plug-in repeatedly, sometimes several times a day, praising the products but always including the phrase "I got mine from xxx company."

Because of the way the Codepath system works, we were able immediately to do something about these "reviews" - i.e. not publish any of them, even in edited form.

I am not sure from everything I have read about the new v10 partnership, how long it would have taken to get the bogus reviews removed.

[Darren B]

Give me a chance Darren.

sorry chris i was referring to a number of questions included through out this forum over the last week or so, they all seem to get glossed over? im tired of the up hill struggle, ill come back when times right

[cbarling]

Posted on behalf of Ed Lennox, from Feefo

I’ve tried to cover the major questions and concerns raised so far in this thread in this single post, I hope that it’s useful.

Overview

The prime purpose of Feefo is to induce trust, and to allow traders to have a proper conversation with their customers. Feefo deliberately only allows actual customers to add reviews and we believe this is a key strength of the system. If you were to go to eBay, and anyone could post reviews, would you trust the feedback? Feefo is attempting to do for merchants what eBay’s feedback does, improved to address some of the issues for merchants.

Feefo also offers the option of ‘product-only follow up’ a longer period after purchase.

Please go to www.feefo.com and click on “Read all reviews” towards the top right hand page of to see reviews of Feefo by Feefo’s customers.

What is the key benefit of a system like Feefo?

One of the friends of our managing director runs a Riad in Morocco. Her manager left one day without notice, taking most of the staff with him. He then wrote a review on Tripadviser saying that the Riad had gone to the dogs since the manager left. When the friend tried to reply, Tripadviser told her that her reply was contentious, so could not be posted.

This could happen on any review or blog site. With Feefo, you automatically have the right of reply, as well as the right to remove material in cases like that described, while maintaining significant consumer trust.

In fact Feefo is about trust, and keeping everything in the open. You wouldn’t fully believe the feedback on eBay if the suppliers could edit it, and that is the crux in establishing trust.

A question was raised about competitors. Feefo provides much more protection from competitor activity than alternatives. We check for links and your competitor would have had to buy a lot in order to give significant numbers of bad reviews, providing a valid name each time for payment. You merely need to point out they are a competitor in your replies to discredit them entirely, so it’s unlikely to even be an issue, and never has in our experience.

Customer service versus product reviews

As explained earlier, Feefo does allow merchants to choose to request follow up product reviews only, at a later date. You can also use Feefo for service reviews only.

If people are looking for reviews on electronics and other commonly sold products, then there are plenty of sites that review these products. There is less value in traders having reviews for these products on site as customers searching specifically for those products have probably already decided to buy them.

If you sell fairly unique products (as do most clothing sites, almost all Feefo's current customers, and a large proportion of Actinic sites), then the product reviewing on the merchants site becomes more important.

The question has also been raised whether service reviews are useful at all. The point is that there is a world of difference between receiving legal service, and receiving good service. You may be able to get your money back with a credit card, but will you be able to return goods without quibble? Service feedback addresses this valid buyer concern.

The advantage of getting both product and service reviews, is that it takes the customer very little extra effort to give both.

Bad reviews

Obviously there will be irrelevant reviews from time to time, but in practice most are relevant and useful. You as the merchant can’t edit the reviews although you can comment, but that is exactly why the reviews will be trusted.

When something has gone wrong and you get a bad review, it's not the making of the mistake that's the issue, it's how you as a business sort it out to the customer's satisfaction that really counts. Being able to highlight the remedial action taken by responding to a bad review is essential IMHO.

So the key issue as regards bad reviews is what you say in your reply. That is what will give your customer confidence. You need to be able to reply patiently to the customer however unreasonable they may be.

Are the customers quoted by Feefo really using the system?

It is true that some of our customers have been slow to display the reviews on their websites. This is partly because large companies take a long period to alter course and design new websites. The incorporation of feedback requires design changes and the decision making process tends to be very long. However all the feedback for the customers that have been quoted is in public on our website and they are all genuine.

Why don’t you use star ratings?

Our system is based on eBay with neutral removed and replaced with an additional positive and an additional negative which forces customers to choose. Like wise percentages are based on eBay. We believe that this is a good system.

What are response rates like?

Feefo’s skill set is around all aspects of feedback, including how to approach customers. As a result, our response rates have been as high as 30%, the lowest we have ever had is 9% and the average 17%. This is far higher than any other review system of which we are aware.

Incidentally, you can see the first ever Feefo customer who is still with us describe their experiences on Youtube
Nick Wheeler of Charles Tyrwhitt.

[Mike Hughes]

You can also use Feefo for service reviews only.

OK. That's good to know. I really think Actinic should develop their own built in product review system.

That in combination with FeeFo for Service Reviews would be a winner.

Mike

[Jan]

Nick Wheeler said on the video that emails where sent out 2 weeks after purchase for review - is this standard - if so it seems about right to me, long enough for people to have used the product but not so long that it's no longer fresh in their minds.

[cbarling]

It should be a parameter that the merchant can set in the Actinic configuration i.e. number of days to request feedback after the order has completed.

Chris

[Jan]

Is pricing per site or per account?

[cbarling]

Right now, the cost will be per site. We may review that in the future.

Chris

[Ed - Feefo]

The way Fishtec display the feedback is their own choice, so should not be necessarily seen as being an example to quote. If a customer rates an item as "Excellent" but says nothing additionally, Fishtec have elected to display their service feedback instead of blank space. All users can post replies to all feedback. Dealing politely with a "nonsense" feedback shows how patient and caring a business is.... Take a look at www.ctshirts.co.uk

[Ed - Feefo]

Hi. It's a;lmost impossible on Feefo to get bogus reviews: unless someone has bought the product, they can't review it. I suppose your competitors might buy items occasionally from you and then write a review, but this, if uncovered, would fall well within the appeals process if they said something demonstrably unfair.
Hope that helps with the confidence in our service? And you can also reply showing that you know who they are....
Ed

[Ed - Feefo]

Hi - I usually respond to everything very promptly, as Chris and all our customers will attest. I have to confess I wasn't prepared for the storm we seem to have created! If it's any consolation, I left home at 7am and got back at 10.30pm. There are so many advantages to the Feefo system and I hope that some of you will give it a try. We have one Actinic user already, who is on an old version (as I understand it) so he uploads a file manually every day - as he has done for a year - so I'm certain he would not do it if he didn't find value in it...

I hope to be able to share some of this as time passes (rather than writing an advert right now!)

Cheers

Ed

[Jan]

What happens when a customer buys the same product repeatedly, are they asked to review it each time or does feefo remember that they have already been asked / written a review of the product.

Can the customer identification information shown against the reviews be customised, one of my sites has very aggressive competitors and if they can identify who my customers are they will be cold calling them, I put something along the lines of Fred from Bolton or similar at the moment.

Regards,